The Australian media's foreign news coverage of COVID-19 and its declining reportage of the Asia Pacific region. Issue 2 (1st November 2021)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Tapsell, Ross
• Is Part Of: Australian journalism review. Volume 43:Issue 2(2021)
• Page Start: 193
• Page End: 209
• Publication Date: 2021-11-01
• Subjects: Journalism -- Australia -- Periodicals; Journalism -- Periodicals; 079.9405
• DOI: 10.1386/ajr_00071_1
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0810-2686

Abstract

This article examines the Australian mainstream media's foreign news coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic. It finds that the Australian mainstream media has comprehensively covered the devastation of COVID-19 in the United States and the United Kingdom, but there was scant coverage of the death toll and policy problems of countries in Australia's region, particularly in neighbouring Southeast Asia. I documented COVID-19 television coverage in the ABC's 7 p.m. news, ABC's 730 current affairs programme and three major Australian broadsheet newspapers: the Australian, the Sydney Morning Herald and the West Australian. In a global pandemic causing widespread deaths on every continent, the article shows how the Australian mainstream media's vast disparity in world coverage conveys a distorted reality of 'newsworthy' pandemic coverage, one that I argue does not reflect Australia's increasingly diverse population nor its place in the Asia Pacific region.